bigger-leaner-stronger

Bigger Leaner Stronger: The Simple Science of Building the Ultimate Male Body

“Email me at any time if you need any help.”

The misinformation in the fitness industry: Lots of Money - much of the information is inspired by the need to keep you buying.

How to use this book

• Structure of the book
  • The Bigger Leaner Stronger philosophy
  • Motivation and goals setting
  • Meal planning
  • Training plan
  • Supplementation
  • Addition insights and tactics
• Learn the hows before the whys
  • Go to Chapter 10 for mean plans
  • Go to Chapter 14 for workout routines
  • Go to chapter 17 for supplementations

Psychology

Motivations

• Why you want to get fit?
• What does your ideal body look like? Try find a picture of it.
• What does your ideal body feel like? Creating affirmations for them!
  • Physical
  • Mental
  • Emotional
  • Spiritual

Willpower

• Dopamine and the halo effect it induces.
• Don’t fight the wave, ride it: think thoughts and feel feelings without acting on them.
• Time preference: we discount a reward’s value based on how long we need to get it.
• Loss aversion
• Pre-commitment: take actions now to ward off future seductions
• Social proof: we look at others to find excuses.
• Habits are contagious — both positive and negative ones.
• Moral licensing — stop moralizing our behaviors!
• Future self-continuity: future you is likely to behave in similar way today. Don’t put too much credit on him.
• What-the-hell-effect: the vicious cycle of “stumble, sulk, and splurge”
• Slackening effect of success: one step forward, two step back. View our wins as evidence of the importance of our goals and our commitment instead.
• Manage your stress.

Habits

• Habits are formed through “habit loop”:
  • Cue
  • Response
  • Reward
• To reshape any habit — according to The Power of Habit
  • Identify the routine
  • Experiment with rewards
    • Write down the feelings that comes up
    • Wait for 15 minutes to determine
  • Isolate the cue
    • Location
    • Time
    • Emotional state
    • Other people
    • Immediately preceding action or event
  • Have a plan

Nothing is written

Reprogramming habit loops will require making deliberate decisions to behave differently.

Implementation Intentions

Implementation intentions are statements about how, when, and where you’ll act: “In situation X, I’ll do Y”.

Also patch it with an if-then statement: “If X occurs, then I’ll do Y.”, or “In situation X, I’ll do Y”.

• Three ways to increase stickiness of new habits:
  • Start small
  • Stack
    • Piggyback a new habit with existing ones.
    • Try to pair the locations, frequencies, and themes as well.
  • Celebrate

Smallest behaviors that matter (SBTMs) from Tiny Habits

• They can be done at least once a day.
• They take less than 30 seconds.
• They require little effort.
• They’re relevant to the full desirable behavior.

Diet

Breaking Myths and Mistakes

Energy Balance

No matter what type of diet you follow, you’ll lose weight only when you consistently eat fewer calories than you burn, and the only way to fail to lose weight is eating too many calories too consistently, not flouting or following the wrong arbitrary eating rules.

Common Mistakes

• Underestimating calories in.
• Overestimating calories out.
• Overeating in the extreme.

• Types of energy intake also matter, it’s not only about CICO.
• Metabolic adaptation will not stop losing weight, and will be reversed after removing energy deficit, and can be mitigated in certain ways.
• Carbs and sugars are not particularly “fattening” — only overeating is.
• Consider foods in terms of their calories, m{a,i}cronutrients, not just “clean” or “dirty”, “good” or “bad”. Also consider your meal plan as a whole, not just a single food.
• Vegan/Vegetarian diet is (unsurprisingly) not good for your health, no valid evidence shows that red meat, diary, or eggs are bad for your heath.
• To maximize muscle building, 5-10 percent more calories than you burn is needed, at the same time fat will accumulate at the about the same rate as muscle.
• Small meals cause small, short metabolic increases, large meals cause larger, longer increases, the overall effects are the same.
• Eating larger meals at night is purely a matter of personal preference. Do what works best for you.

Flexible Diet

Basic Principles

You use diet to control your body fat level and boost muscle growth, and you use training to gain and maintain strength and muscle.

• Control your calories.
  • To lose fat, eat fewer calories than you burn.
  • To maximize muscle growth, eat more calories than you burn.
• Eat plenty of protein.
• Eat plenty of nutritious, relatively unprocessed food.
  • e.g. Zinc boosts metabolism level; Fiber is good for your health.
  • Unprocessed foods have higher thermal effect of food (TEF) — they requires more energy to digest.
  • Eat at least 80 percent of your calories from the “food stuff”.
• Eat a balance of carbohydrate and fat that works for you.
  • Carbohydrate
    • Difference forms of carbohydrate have varied conversion rate.
    • A slow carb isn’t always a high-quality one and a fast one isn’t always junk.
    • Your body creates glycogen from carbohydrate, which is crucial for strength training and recovery.
  • Fat
    • Low-to-moderate saturated fat intake is okay, too much of it can impair heart health.
    • Monounsaturated fat is one of the best forms of fat you can eat. Polyunsaturated fat is essential, a ratio of omega-6-to-omega-3 intake between 2:1 and 1:1 appears to be optimal, for most people this require at least 3-to-6 grams of omega-3 fatty acids per day.
    • Cholesterol is carried by lipoproteins. Low-Density Lipoprotein (LDL) is the “bad” type, while High-Density Lipoprotein (HDL) is the “good” type. The best way is not eating less cholesterol, but regular exercise (especially intense exercise and strength training,) low body fat levels, good sleep hygiene, and no smoking.

Calculating calories and macros

Resting Energy Trumps

Your basal metabolic rate accounts most of the total daily energy expenditure, not physical active energy.

• Cutting
  • Slow cutting is slow — you probably want to zip to the destination.
  • An aggressive-but-not-reckless calorie deficit of 20-to-25 percent.
  • Eating 8 to 12 calories per pound of body weight per day creates a 20-to-25 percent calorie deficit in most people. (9 to 13 calories per jin)
  • Daily energy expenditure calculator
  • When there are a lot of fat to cut, it’s best to split it into several periods.
  • Cutting phase target: 10 to 12 percent body fat.
• Lean gaining
  • Maintain a calorie surplus of about 10 percent. For most people, 16-to-8 calories per pound of body weight per day. (18 to 20 calories per jin)
  • Should stop when body fat reaches 15 to 17 percent.
• Maintaining
  • 12 to 16 calories per pound of body weight per day is the sweet spot for most people when maintaining. (13 to 18 calories per jin)

Note that the above calories intake estimation should take active energy into consideration.

• Protein
  • Each gram of protein contains about 4 calories.
  • In all cases, protein intake usually comes out to around 30-to-40 percent of daily calories.
  • High-protein eating is fairly straightforward — a couple of servings of meat of fish per day along with some dairy, legumes, or whole grains, and maybe a scoop or two of protein powder if needed.
  • Animal protein is more conducive to muscle gain.
• Carbohydrate
  • Each gram of carbohydrate contains about 4 calories.
  • Starting with 30-to-50 percent of your daily calories from carbohydrate is recommended.
• Fat
  • Each gram of fat contains about 9 calories.
  • 20-to-30 percent of daily calories from fat works well for most people.

Meal Plan

• The ideal meal plan:

  • Controls your calories.
  • Controls your macros.
  • Includes foods you like.
  • Provides adequate nutrition.
  • Follows a schedule you like.

• Method of planning:

  • Calculate your calories and macros
  • Choose how many meals to eat.
  • Choose what to eat and drink.
  • Choose when and how much to eat and drink.

• Choosing how many meals to eat

  • Eating less than 2 meals a day is not good for muscle gaining
  • Schedule meals based on appetite
  • Skipping dinner could potentially result in nighttime hunger and disrupt sleep.

• Alcohol

  • Alcohol helps losing weight for beginners.
  • Alcohol decreases appetite.
  • Alcohol can’t be absorbed, hence the calories “don’t count”.
  • However, alcohol constipates our body’s fat-burning mechanisms and augments its fat-making ones.

• Salt - Insufficient potassium intake is more severe than too much sodium intake

• Making the plan

  • To make a meal plan, start from protein, then to carbs (start with vegetables,) then to fat, then treats.
  • Cronometer - Online food database
  • Try to eat 30-to-40 grams of protein at a time. There is an upper limit to how much muscle growth can occur from a single serving of protein, there’s also a minimum amount of protein required to reach that ceiling.
  • Dark leafy greens like spinach, lettuce, kale, or collard greens are good for your health for their abundance of nitrates, isothiocyanates, potassium, and other beneficial compounds.

• “Treating” meal

  • Do it just once or twice per week.
  • Try not to surpass your maintenance calories. — Calorie borrowing, prioritize high-protein food.
  • Drink alcohol sensibly.

• Pre/Post-workout nutrition

  • Protein (leucine) stimulates the creation of muscle proteins (muscle protein synthesis) and suppresses (by stimulating the production of insulin) the breakdown of muscle tissue (muscle protein breakdown)
  • Protein provides your body with the raw materials (amino acids) needed to build muscle tissue.
  • If you haven’t eaten protein three-to-four hours before your workout, your body’s muscle protein synthesis going to be low.
  • Once you finished a workout, eat within 30-to-60 minutes to maximize muscle gain — anabolic window. Note that this window depends on the previous protein intake.
  • High-carb diets result in generally higher insulin levels, leading to lower muscle protein breakdown rates. — Adding carbs to post-workout meal helps.
  • Carb won’t be stored as fat until glycogen stores have been refilled, hence placing carb-rich meals immediately after work out is recommended.

Serving and Portion

Training

Clarifying Myths and Mistakes

• Any guy can gain enough muscles to look and feel fantastic, regardless of genes. That said, people with larger bones tend to be more muscular.
• The most reliable way to get big is to get strong, that is, to lift heavy weights.
  • Heavy weightlifting produces large amounts of tension in your muscle, causing a great activation of muscle fibers.
  • Generating higher levels of tension in muscles over time is the single most effective way to stimulate muscle growth.
  • The most effective way is exercises that involve multiple joints and muscle groups (compound exercises).
  • The ways muscles attach to skeleton affects strength, which can vary be up to 25% among people with identical lean mass.
• Most people can build muscle and lose fat at the same time.
  • Beginners can manage to do this easily.
  • If you have at least 6-to-8 months of effective training and have gained at least 10 pounds of muscle, then you probably can’t do both.
• Changing the exercise type doesn’t make muscles grow, progressive tension overload does.
• Strength training is safe and beneficial.
• Workout split is not the end, it’s the measure.
• Strength training is good for losing fat.
  • Adding resistance training to the cardio workouts resulted in less weight loss due to muscle gain but more fat loss.
  • The less muscle your body breaks down for energy, the more body fat it must burn instead.
  • Strength training boost the number of calories you burn after your workouts and raise your basal metabolic rate over time.
  • Heavier weights and fewer reps (7 or fewer per set) produces better metabolic effects.
• You don’t need a lot of cardio to get and stay lean.
  • Cardio doesn’t burn as much energy as we wish it did.
  • In short term, it makes you more fatigued, which makes it harder to progress in training.
  • In long term, excessive cardio disrupts cell signaling related to muscle growth.
• Isolation exercises are helpful
  • It allows you to continue training specific muscle groups when it’s no longer practical to do so with a compound exercise.
  • It allows you to train a muscle group in different positions and through different ranges of motions, which likely improves muscle growth.
  • It can be fun.
  • Repeating the same exercises for long periods of time increases the risk of repetitive stress injuries.

Strength Training

Triggers for muscle growth

• Mechanical tension - “passive” when stretching and “active” when contracting
• Microscopic damage to muscle fibers caused by high level of tension.
• Cellular fatigue.

Among which, mechanical tension is the most effective. Note that progressive overload is neccessary.

• Three types of movements

  • Pushing
  • Pulling
  • Squatting

• 3-5 | 9-12 | 9-12 | 75-85 | 1-3 | 2-4 | 8 formula

  • Do 3-to-5 strength training workouts a week.
    • Overreaching can turn into overtraining
    • Muscle isn’t built in gym — that’s where you give the signal to grow.
  • Do 9-to-12 hard sets per major muscle group per week.
  • Do 9-to-12 hard sets per workout.
  • Use 75-85 percent of one-rep max.
    • 80-to-85 percent of one-rep max (4-to-6 reps per set) for primary exercises.
    • 75-to-80 percent of one rep max (6-to-8 reps per set) for accessory exercises.
    • Using heavier weights for fewer reps is better for gaining strength.
  • End most hard sets 1-to-3 reps shy of muscular failure.
    • Taking a set to muscular failure isn’t more anabolic than ending close to muscular fatigue.
    • Training to muscular failure causes disproportionately more fatigue.
  • Rest 2-to-4 minutes in between hard sets.
  • Deload every 8 weeks.

• Double progression

  • Once you hit the top of the rep range for a certain number of sets, increase the weight.
  • Work with it until you reach the progression target (number of top-rep sets) again.

• Full range of motion is more effective for gaining muscle

  • Move the affected joints through their full and normal range of flexion and extension
  • It makes your muscles work harder
  • It reduces the risk of joint pain and injury by distributing the stress over the entirety of the joint.

• Exercise form

  • You should always feel that your muscles are actively working to produce motion, not just using gravity or momentum.
  • Using proper weight is crucial for proper form.

• Hard sets

  • End hard sets of bodyweight exercise 1 rep shy of muscular failure (0 good rep left in tank)
  • End hard sets of primary exercises 2-to-3 reps shy of muscle failure (1-to-2 good reps left). Primary exercises are those that train the most muscle mass and use the most weight, usually compound exercises.
  • End hard sets of accessory exercises 1-to-2 reps shy of muscular failure (0-to-1 reps left). Accessory exercises are usually isolation exercises.

• Rep tempo

  • Heavy weight is more important, thus fast rep tempo is recommended.
  • “1-0-1” rep tempo: complete the first part of a rep in one second, pause briefly, then go back in one second.

• Avoid injury

  • The most common cause of injury is failing to fully recover from previous workouts. — Repetitive Stress Injuries (RSIs)
  • Strength training is demanding — If you do enough of it, you’ll bound to develop RSI here and there.
  • Staying away from an exercise or movement pattern for a week or two should fix it.
  • ==If you feel sharp pain when doing an exercise, end the set immediately.==
  • “Slow is smooth, smooth is Fast.” Progress gradually.

Exercises

Primary Pushing Exercises

• Barbell Bench Press
  • Eyes are directly under the bar.
  • Hands slightly wider than shoulder-width apart; forearms should be straight up-and-down.
  • Back arched to make up a gap that can fit a hand; keep shoulders and butt on the bench.
  • Settle the bar into the base of palm.
  • Feet on the floor about shoulder-width apart and directly under knees.
  • Squeeze the bar as hard as you can, and lower it until it touches your chest.
  • Keep your elbows about 6-to-10 inches from your ribs.
  • Finish the last rep straight then slam the bar back
• Incline Barbell Bench Press
  • Adjust the bench to roughly 45 degree angle.
  • Helpful for building shoulder and chest muscles.
  • Unlike most other muscles, pectoralis major fibers are not all aligned in the same direction. Sternocostal head and Clavicular head.
• Close-Grip Bench Press
  • Using a slightly narrower grip to emphasize the triceps muscles. Hands are directly over shoulder.
• Dumbbell Bench Press
  • Push the dumbbells straight up until your arms are straight
• Dip
• Standing Barbell Overhead Press
  • Bar at the height of mid-chest. Palms facing forward, slightly wider than shoulder-width.
  • Wrists should be bent just enough for the bar to settle into the base of palm.
  • Squeeze glutes and the bar as hard as you can and push it straight up.
• Seated Barbell Overhead Press
  • Emphasizes the shoulder muscles more.
  • Easier to perform correctly.
• Seated Dumbbell Press
• Arnold Dumbbell Press

Accessory Pushing Exercise

• Triceps Pushdown
• Seated Triceps Press
  • Ideally wrists are just below the elbow
  • Minimize upper arm movement
• Lying Triceps Extension (“Skull Crasher”)
  • Until bar is directly over forehead
  • If elbows irritated, lowering the bar until it almost touches the bench
• Dumbbell Side Lateral Raise

Primary Pulling Exercise

• Barbell Deadlift
  • Bar over the middle of the feet, feet slightly narrower than shoulder and point out
  • Grip the bar just outside the shin
  • Try to move the bar vertically
  • Drop the bar once to the ground its lowered pass the knees, don’t place it slowly!
  • Use Valsalva maneuver to control breath!
    • Breath in 80%
    • Tongue against roof of mouth, try to breath in the mouth while not letting air escape.
    • The inner abdomen pressure helps stabilize torso
    • Be aware that this technique increases blood pressure significantly.
• Barbell Romanian Deadlift
  • Start up straight with a flat back
  • Lower the bar until the back start to round
  • Pull up and repeat.
• Barbell Row
  • Same as Deadlift, but feet wider
  • Back parallel to the ground
• One-Arm Dumbbell Row
• Pull-Up
• Chin-Up
• Lat Pulldown
  • Pronated, medium grip
  • Or close-grip, which trains back in a different way
• Seated Cable Row (Wide- and Close-Grip)

Accessory Pulling Exercises

• Barbell Curl
• Alternating Dumbbell Curl
• Dumbbell Hammer Curl
• EZ-Bar Preacher Curl
• Barbell Rear Delt Row
• Dumbbell Rear Lateral raise (Standing or Seated)
• Machine Reverse Fly
• Leg Curl

Primary Squatting Exercises

• Barbell Squat
  • End: Thigh parallel to the ground.
• Barbell Front Squat
  • Elbow as high as possible
• Leg Press

Accessory Squatting Exercises

• Dumbbell Lunge (Walking or In-Place)
• Dumbbell Bulgarian Split Squat

Workout Program

• Routines
  • 5-Day: Push, Pull, Upper A, Legs, Upper B
  • 4-Day: Push, Pull, Upper, Legs
  • 3-Day: Push, Pull, Legs, at least a rest day between Pull and Legs
• Warm up
  • Set 1: 6 reps with 50% percent of hard-set weight, rest for a minute.
  • Set 2: 4 reps with 70% of hard-set weight, rest for a minute.
• Deloading
• Reduce volume instead of intensity